What Are The Stages Inside A Call Center?

So you were recently hired or are in the process of getting hired as a customer service agent in a call center, now what?

Turnover in call centers can be high, so the industry has developed a very structured path to get a new person from "applicant" to "expert" as efficiently as possible. This lifecycle ensures that agents are confident before they face difficult customers alone.

As we learned in the previous section (What are the departments or verticals?), many departments interact with eachother to fully run a BPO operation. In this section, we will cover how the process normally flows between some of those departments to ensure a person is hired, trained, and gets ready to handle interactions.

1. Recruitment: The filtering process. This involves language tests, typing speed tests, and interviews.

2. Offer and Onboarding: The legal portion. This is about understanding the company, signing a contract, and understanding work policies. Remember, you are being directly hired by the BPO/Call Center, not by the Client.

3. Classroom Training: The theory phase. New hires sit in a group setting, virtual or physical (also called Brick and Mortar), to learn the software and the product. Example: Learning how to process a refund in the system without actually doing it yet.

4. Nesting: The transition phase. Agents move to the production floor after completing their training weeks. They take live calls, but specialized support staff (floor walkers or subject matter experts -SME-) stand right behind them to help with every click. In some cases, the Nesting stage can be considered a phase of Training, and in others, it is considered an Operations portion.

5. Production (Go-Live): The agent is now fully trained and certified. They sit with the general population and handle calls independently, supported by their Team Leader.

Most BPOs, at least the good ones, normally offer growth opportunities to their agents, and they hire from within. This means that you, as an agent, will have the opportunity to advance in your career inside the BPO by becoming a Supervisor or Team Leader, a Trainer, a Quality Analyst, or a Workforce Analyst. If you have a background in other areas such as recruitment, HR, and IT, there are also possibilities to grow towards those areas.

Here's a brief graphic flow of the process we just reviewed above:

In the next sections, we will cover some basic terms used inside the BPO industry, the set of skills that are normally required by agents, and how Operations normally works.